CA Clarity now offers improved long-range forecasting tools and new enhancements for collaboration

Users of CA Clarity told the company that the software "needed better forecasting and stronger long-term planning tools," said Mary Cauwels, CA senior director of product marketing for service and portfolio management. The new software allows users "to express their priorities in more business and financial terms," she said.

CA Clarity PPM (Project and Portfolio Management) version 13.1 will also come with new enhancements for collaboration.

According to Cauwels, this version of the software is the first to allow project managers to associate roles to cost plans. Managers can define roles, such as architects and developers, and then associate a cost to each role. As people fill the roles, the generic roles can be replaced by specific names. This should give planners more realistic assessments of the future spending on projects.

Clarity PPM 13.1 will also allow users to merge cost plans associated with specific projects and portfolios. While now users can update and replace costs of specific plans, this new capability will allow managers to incorporate cost estimates without replacing the entire cost plan, easing the revisions of long-term plans.

Version 13 of Clarity, released in January featured an entirely new user interface, one that was far more interactive for users. This update builds on this new emphasis of usability. A new portlet provides a hierarchical view of resource allocations by investment, allowing users to drill down to from the organizational level to the portfolio level and to individual project level.

Clarity's collaboration capabilities have also been improved through a number of additional modules. CA Clarity Agile will facilitate sharing across virtual teams while CA Clarity Requirements will help coworkers in different locations work together to development requirements. Through add-ons, both modules can be integrated into third-party Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) software, which should strengthen managerial overview of software development projects.

Organizations can purchase CA Clarity PPM as software, or access Clarity as a hosted service from CA.